31 Days: Day 10 - Stain removal

This post was originally from May 27, 2008. I feel like I'm cheating a little, but I wanted to do a post on cleaning the stains from my grody carpet, but I'd already done it. Part of me improving my home, is learning to be efficient. So here's me at the peak of efficiency...

Today, ladies, we're talkin' stains. I don't know what made me do this, but the other day, while I was cleaning, I decided to document some of the stain removal that took place. I do love a product that does what it says it will do and that is what I want to share with you.

I give you Exhibit A:

This is where my youngest little darling ate a red popsicle while sitting in my new chair, and apparently dropped it on the floor...unbeknownst to me. Now, some of you may say, "Just move that rug over a little and no one will be the wiser!" Well, I would know. End of discussion. Here it is a little closer up...

Closer...

That's close enough. If I were doing an infomercial, I would show you pictures of how I used everything under the sun to get this stain out and how I struggled and strained and made myself look like a complete idiot who had never even seen a rag before. Instead, I went right to the product that I knew would do the trick and I went straight to work.

Here is where I sprayed the product on the stain and already it's starting to work.

That's red popsicle on the rag there. It doesn't look as bright in the picture as it did in real life. I was impressed with how it picked it right up.

Oh wait, here's a better shot of the rag.

There's the place where the spot was. It has a little bit of a pinkish hue, but I have three girls so I'm not really afraid of the color pink. And besides, if anyone notices that I have a small pinkish colored hue on my carpet by my new chair, I think I'll just move the rug over a bit.

Aren't you just dying to know what this miracle cleaner is? Well I'll show you. Ladies, meet Folex. Folex, meet the ladies.

Now this is one of those cleaners that doesn't have any fancy packaging and kind of sits there in the cleaning aisle either on a shelf far below or high above the national brands. I imagine it sitting there, just waiting for someone to take a chance on it. Knowing it has a big secret. What's that secret? IT WORKS! And I have my mother-in-law to thank for telling me about it. She has lots of pets. In the house. Dogs. And Cats. In the house. She goes through this stuff like you wouldn't believe. And I have a toddler. In the house. And we're potty training. In the house. Well, you get the idea. Nevertheless, it works every time.

Here's another problem area that I simply got tired of looking at the other day. I just had to do something about it.

This is an area right by the door that everyone comes in and out of. I can't even tell you what those stains are. They're the kind of stains generated by 4 kids. Some of them were sticky and some were hard. It wasn't pretty. This sounds like a job for Folex.

I know the carpet still looks a little dingy, but that's another problem all together. I barely put any elbow grease into those stains and look at how much better it looks.

I have one more product to share with you. This is the stuff I pull out when I've got a really stubborn stain. Like this one here. And don't underestimate this stain because of it's size.

You want to know what that is? That, my friends, is a little glob of silly putty. The rest of it I found in the pocket of my daughter's favorite jeans. It has a nasty habit of melting wherever it lands and fusing itself to whatever it lands on. I tried to pick up this little bit of green goo no less than 10 times before I finally got it through my head that it was fused to the carpet and it wasn't going anywhere.

Now it looks a little more like chewing gum. Which would be equally impossible to get out.

Enter my new best friend, Stainz-R-Out. I bought it one day in a moment of weakness watching an infomercial. Some idiot lady was trying to figure out how to use a rag and suddenly all of her problems were solved by this little yellow bottle of goodness. I actually used all of my first order and had to call the 800 number on the back and order more. I love it.

I works particularly well on sticky and greasy things that seem to repel water based cleaners. It's made with banana oil so it gets in there and really breaks up the offending stuff. It does smell like bananas, though, so if you're like my friend Francesca and hate the smell of bananas, you won't like what you smell when you start using this stuff. I, on the other hand, don't mind the smell of bananas, so we get along great. Here's where that spot was.

I know, I know. You say you see a little bit of a greenish hue. Well, I'm not going to try to pick up that greenish hue 10 times while vacuuming. I'd say that's another victory for Stainz-R-Out!

Here's one last story. You know those things little kids bring home from Chuck E. Cheeses or Mr. Gatti's that look like a mini lava lamp? It's a clear plastic tube that has goo in it and you tilt it back and forth watching the goo slowly move from one end to the other like slow moving waves? Then you wonder what that goo would do if it were outside of the confines of that plastic tube and you throw it to see if it will break? Well, my son wondered that very thing and I'll be darned if that goo didn't leave a permanent stain on my mother-in-law's carpet that would come and go at will. Some days it was really dark and sticky and some days you couldn't really see it at all. When I got my Stainz-R-Out, I was really excited about how well it worked so I took it over there and it got almost all of it out. Even I couldn't believe it. Here's the link again, just in case you missed it. That link again is Stainz-R-Out. Now I'm starting to sound like an infomercial!




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